I'll start hearing the Dragon Warrior music, and it won't go away. (or Mega Man, or Final Fantasy, or any of a couple dozen video games that I can pick out from the outlines of the main character sprites burned into my retina)
I love those old songs, but I never want to hear anything like them again!
It only takes a mention of one of those old games to get me humming its theme music for a week, if I hear new ones I'll eventually have a complete set of rotating video game music in my head. That would be a fate worse than death, worse even than getting a Muzak ear implant.
...the bacteria that live in rocks in the Antarctic?
We really don't know all that much about the extremely hostile environment organisms, because they're hard to culture. When we rub something on agar and don't get a culture, we tend to assume nothing's there (obviously, I'm oversimplifying, but our test methods generally look for stuff that likes "good" conditions).
You make good points, but I still wouldn't be too surprised if there are a few really tough spores floating around each cubic meter or air that will survive for a thousand years in practically any conditions and are just waiting for properly miserable conditions, like you describe, to wake up.
This is nice, but when will they drop a camera...
on
Helicopter In Space
·
· Score: 3
...into Saturn or Jupiter?
Putting a balloon with a good video camera on it in a gas giant's atmosphere would be the coolest thing since Viking.
I think NASA's first priority should be getting people interested in space, which means a steady stream of cool pictures of alien worlds. Forget about getting maximum scientific bang for the buck, if they can raise interest to the point it was when they started the Apollo project, they'll have lots of money to do science.
All I can say about this project is that they'd better send home some good pictures, instead of just using the images for the on-board computer.
You're about to kill a thing and you worry about causing it pain? It's a good idea not to cause unnecessary pain to an animal you're going to keep, because otherwise it might turn on you or otherwise be harder to handle, but a painful death gives exactly the same result as a painless one.
I wouldn't gutshoot a deer, but that's because I'd hate to either lose it or foul the meat.
I think the proper way to kill livestock is to bleed them. It makes the best meat and doesn't contaminate the meat with CS fluid (which may or may not spread mad cow disease).
IMHO, we should save our concern for those who will still be alive tomorrow.
When I die, I want to go out kicking and screaming, not caught unawares or drugged mindless.
Now there was a "War is cool!" movie if I've ever seen one.
The opening scene did a pretty good job of showing the very worst of war, but the final bridge-guarding scene was total "rah-rah the American army kicks ass!" tripe (entertaining though it was). Yeah, some of them died, but not the main characters, and they were very improbably successful against those odds.
I bet that movie did wonders for US army recruiting.
For you non-Canadians out there, section 33 is known as the Notwithstanding Clause.
Basically, it states that the government can disregard section 2 (labeled "fundamental freedoms"), sections 7-14 (labeled "legal rights"), and section 15 (labeled "equality before the law"), under slightly irregular terms (but not requiring any special justification).
Furthermore, section 1 says: "The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society."
This sounds nice, but our supreme court only seems to read "subject to...reasonable limits", meaning that if the law infringes on your rights, but the judges think it it's "reasonable", the law stands and the rights are ignored.
So, between these two sections, we Canadians have no rights over whatever laws our current government sees fit to pass.
We screwed up bigtime. Watch your government so it doesn't happen to you.
...but it was too distracting being constantly surrounded by food, looking up at me with it's liquid little eyes, as if to say "Eat me! Please, Sir, I'm ever so tasty. There's a microwave in the break room, you can cook me there."
I seem to have PO'd some jerk with moderator access, he's going around marking all of my posts as trolls (I guess he couldn't find "-1: Moderator Was Offended" or "-1: Moderator On Vendetta"); he'll get his in the MM. I'm trying to explain that this argument is based on a misunderstanding, and my other "trolls" provoked agreeing replies, or no replies, but not arguments. If I'm trolling, I'm doing a piss-poor job of it.
I'm not arguing in any way that heroin doesn't have legitimate uses (if you look in my "user info" and read some of the other stuff I've written in this discussion, you'll see that), or that legalizing it won't reduce harm. I'm only arguing that it's a completely different situation than alcohol prohibition (pot prohibition, OTOH, is a more similar to alcohol prohibition, though still on a lot smaller scale).
If you read my posts more carefully, you'd see that. I might ask if you are trolling me, since you almost seem to be intentionally ignoring my words.
For example...
Me: Everybody knows that heroin (as it is available on the street) is 1) very addictive and 2) bad for your health to the point where you might die every time you use it.
You: Your number 2 is a property of street heroin [...]
"as it is available on the street": I put those words in for a reason, and you replied as if I had implied the opposite. That whole post was about the kinds of people who take heroin now, and the total disregard they have for their own welfare. It's like people who play Russian roulette: take away the revolvers and they'll find something equally stupid to do (and whether there are legitimate uses for revolvers, or crime could be reduced by legalizing them and building them so they don't blow up in your hand, has no significance to that problem).
There's a tiny minority of people who use heroin, almost all of them abuse it, and they're pretty screwed up to begin with. Practically everybody drank alcohol before and during prohibition, most of them used it fairly responsibly, and most of them had reasonable mental health.
Escapism and self-destruction are not the same thing,
True, but heroin use isn't escapism, it's self-destruction. Everybody knows that (again, as it is available on the street) heroin is terrible for your health and any one high might kill you. Knowing that, what kind of idiot would start taking the stuff? Only the severely self-destructive kind.
If heroin is made relatively safe, the people who are currently drawn to heroin will find something equally or more self-destructive to do.
This is why legalizing heroin will not save many junkies: only a fairly small proportion of them ever regain the mental stability to avoid self-destructive behavior. It would be very good to save them, but it's not nearly as important as making sure a little drink on the sly doesn't blind or kill the majority of your citizens.
So I guess I have 2 arguments: 1) the junkie problem is a problem with the junkies, not the junk, and 2) all the junkies could die tomorrow, and society at large would barely notice (some unreliable workers wouldn't show up for work, some welfare cheques would stop being collected, crime would go down), but if a quarter the people who drink alcohol occasionally went blind or died from it, society would be severely disrupted. 2 isn't a pleasant argument, just a cold, hard fact: prohibition had to be lifted, it would have destroyed the country; while it would be good to lift heroin prohibition, it is not strictly necessary.
...that heroin today doesn't hurt anyone who's not asking for it. It's been illegal for a long time, and everybody knows how unhealthy the junk you can buy on the street is.
The only people who start doing it are halfway suicidal. People who value their lives don't fill a needle with god-knows-what they got off the street and pump it into their veins.
With prohibition, OTOH, alcohol started out in extremely common use. People had ways of doing things (like partying) that required alcohol, and when their regulated, healthy supply was cut off, they naturally used the unregulated, dangerous supply (having had access to the good stuff all their lives, they just expected that the most dangerous think in their bathtub gin would be ethanol).
The point was that alcohol prohibition killed healthy, productive members of society, while the heroin prohibition mostly kills suicidal nutcases who will probably find some other way to off themselves a bit at a time if heroin is made relatively safe. The main benefit of legalizing heroin (to the junkies) is saving the relatively small number who eventually come to their senses; the majority have serious mental issues, and heroin use is just one more self-destructive behavior symptomatic of these problems.
I'm not arguing that heroin should be illegal, I just don't think it's as important as prohibition was.
By contrast, alcohol today is relatively safe, with only two types of victims being common: guys that drink themselves to death over a period of years because they're too chicken-shit to just jump off a bridge, and people killed when morons drive cars around drunk.
Everybody knows that heroin (as it is available on the street) is 1) very addictive and 2) bad for your health to the point where you might die every time you use it.
Do you think that the people who take heroin aren't just the same "too chicken-shit to just jump off a bridge" people who drink everything in sight as soon as they can get their hands on it?
They know it's bliss in this needle and death in the next! They don't care. To try heroin in its common use (supply: who knows what's in it, dose: as high as you can get, so much that you'll never be able to get that high again), you have to decide that your life isn't worth more than a bit of fun.
Sure, if they survive for some years, they might change their mind about what their life is worth. That's where it really sucks. People would never bother with insanely addictive megadoses of heroin unless, at the moment they take it, they don't value their life.
Yes, heroin might not be the "horrible, horrible thing it is today", but that doesn't mean that the same people wouldn't destroy themselves somehow.
That isn't the case with alcohol.
Alcohol is integrated into society, probably because weak alcoholic drinks (like watered wine, as the Greeks drank at breakfast, lunch, and dinner) were a lot safer to drink than water from ponds and rivers. When prohibition came, people still didn't know how to party without booze. So a lot of normal, non-self-destructive people were put in the position of needing to buy bathtub gin. It's pretty different.
I became addicted to cigarettes because i was unwise
I smoke, but I am not an addict. I have been smoking a pipe for about 4 years and I keep my pipe, tobacco, and matches in my coat pocket so it is always with me. I enjoy smoking tremendously, but I only do it once every month or two. At times, early on, I tried smoking every day, and tried cigarettes. I knew that I didn't want to continue to do this, but I wanted to see what it was like (my curiosity is one reason I stay away from most drugs; since I've done things like gather a jar of spiders and dump it down my shirt to see what effect it would have on me, at the time a moderately severe arachnophobe, I know it wouldn't take a big step for me to be dissecting my hand to see how all the cords and levers work. I think I need all the inhibitions I've got).
I've felt the cravings. They don't impress me. Despite feeling as if my hand was drawn toward my pipe pocket, constantly imagining how nice it would taste to suck smoke from the pipe, thinking how much I liked to strike matches and enjoyed the scent of a struck match, I didn't light up. Given that I wasn't going to smoke, they were as relevant as imagining how much fun it would be to ride a dragon. That is how I think of them, which is why they don't influence me.
The key factor in removing (or avoiding) an addiction, or correcting any stupid behavior, is a moment of clarity. Practically every cigarette smoker, every drunk, and every junkie who dropped their habit started to get their hit one day and thought "this is stupid, I may feel like want this right now, but I will regret doing it, so I don't really want it".
There is a simple 4-step method to have a moment of clarity whenever you need one: 1)Ask yourself "What is my situation?" Be totally, brutally honest. If your whole body is metaphorically screaming for your addiction to be satisfied, note that. If you've got the means to satisfy that craving close at hand, note that too. Don't deceive yourself or make claims about what you think you can handle at this stage.
2)Ask yourself "What do I, as a rational person, really want?" Be complete. Not just "I want to make the craving go away" but "I want to make the craving go away, I'd rather not have it come back, and I want to avoid the dangers of taking this drug".
3)Ask yourself "What should I do to achieve that?" This will usually be very clear (ex. don't light that cigarette, or any others).
4)Obey your rational choice. Don't think to yourself "I really shouldn't smoke another cigarette", tell yourself "don't smoke another cigarette." Mean it. Give yourself an order, and obey it. Don't play coy little games and pretend there's some force pressing your hand toward the cigarette case, there isn't and the idea that there is and the idea that your hand is itching to grab for a cigarette is silly. Your hand doesn't want a cigarette, it has no mind of it's own. You crave the cigarette, but that has nothing to do with your hands, which are controlled by your mind, which has decided that it's not going to move the hands to light the cigarette.
It sounds stupid, but talking it out with yourself works. That infuriating part of the mind that makes cravings creates illusions of a more direct link between the craving and the process of consuming what is craved; these illusions are easily dismissed by rational thought. You get satisfaction endorphines that blunt the cravings. Don't bother removing the temptation, that removes the positive reinforcement of frequently resisting that temptation. Carry that pack of cigarettes around with you, and you'll be surprised how good it feels to not smoke them, even when you feel lousy from nicotine withdrawal. Try to waste cigarettes, hide them from yourself, and make them tough to get at and you'll give in to the illusion that you're fighting an enemy, instead of making a decision.
Wake up. Be sane. Don't get bogged down in the metaphors your subconscious provides; your consciousness was built to filter them out when they're not useful. Your subconscious has been tricked into thinking your body needs the drug, your consciousness is both responsible for and capable of recognizing this deception and acting appropriately.
You've taken half the step and realized it's your own fault. Take the other half and realize that it'll be your own fault each time you smoke another cigarette.
I've seen way too many lives destroyed by the horrors of real drugs.
Were they indeed real drugs? Or were they the adulterated garbage that is most commonly sold on the street?
Most drugs are cut, and drug dealers aren't too picky about what they cut it with: if it matches colour, it'll do.
Heroin certainly isn't good for you, but stuff like baking soda, baby powder, and laxative powder does not belong in your veins! Pure heroin's effects are almost purely psychological, it's physical side effects are relatively minor (unlike, say, alcohol). Never mind the difficulty of determining an appropriate dosage from an unreliable source!
Consider a moonshiner who makes rotgut with nearly as much methanol as ethanol and you'll have some idea of the kind of suppliers you're dealing with.
The biggest problems of drugs are caused by them being illegal: impure supply, high cost, inability to openly discuss your habit (both for moderating use and technical skills like learning how not to blow bubbles in your veins), and the feeling "I'm a criminal, what's one more crime?". Not only that, but they have some valid uses:
Heroin is a pain killer 4 times as effective as morphine.
Coca leaf tea is a little pick-me-up like coffee, and is good for the digestion.
Pot makes you relaxed, friendly, and hungry (and stupid). It's a social lubricant like alcohol, minus the puking and bar fights (plus pigging out and laughing at really bad jokes; pretty good trade-off, no?). They should be encouraging people to use it instead of alcohol, it would cut way down on crime.
If weed, shrooms, and E are gateway drugs, it is only because they are illegal. If you could get them at the corner drug store, you wouldn't be rubbing elbows with the heroin pushers.
IMHO, uppers, downers, intoxicants, and happy pills all have their place, when used in moderation (hint 1: uppers' & downers' place is not entertainment, hint 2: intoxicants are not for solitary use, hint 3: unlike intoxicants, it is not appropriate to encourage your friends to take happy pills with you). I personally think messing with hallucinogens is wrong, people have little enough grasp on reality as it is.
The war on drug users must be stopped at all cost. They are the victims, as well as the perpetrators, and punishing them does no one any good.
You can call me weak or say I have no will power, but I am not the only one out there who has been addicted to something.
A lot of ex-addicts have that "I'm a victim, I must be protected from that evil stuff" mentality. Well, guess what? You did it to yourself.
Everyone told you "the more you take it, the more you'll want to take it", but did you carefully watch how much you were taking and nip it in the bud while you still could?
It has nothing to do with will power and everything to do with laziness and self-destructiveness. Between all the drug war propaganda, and the current quality of drugs available, both irrational and rational people know doing "hard" drugs is a bad idea. Despite the way you people describe it it's not "that sounds like fun, I think I'll try it!" it's "my life sucks, but I'm too much of a pussy to kill myself all at once." To Hell with you! Clean yourself up and learn that real happiness comes in small bites or get some quicker-acting poison and do it right, but don't whine to me about how you got lured into it, I know that's bullshit and I really don't care anyway.
A lot of fat people claim to be addicted to overeating; that's not sufficient reason to put everyone on a strict diet and break into candy factories with guns blazing.
...because it was mostly off-the-shelf. Most importantly, the CPU and the OS were 3rd-party products that anyone could buy.
Add in that the peripheral and software markets were open, meaning that the necessary interfaces were documented, including every function of the BIOS. So now you've got the CPU, the OS, the peripherals, the firmware, and the specifications for how it connects to everything. Reverse-engineering is too strong a term for most of what the people had to do to clone the PC.
Basically, you just had to recreate the motherboard chipset (for which you practically had the functional spec already) and you could buy the rest of the components on the open market for the same price IBM pays, and then your computer could take advantage of all the software written for the IBM PC.
If you wanted to clone an Apple, you had to clone everything, and to get your hands on the specs, you had to sign agreements not to use it for anything nasty like cloning (not quite as nasty as some other agreements, though, like Nintendo's infamous agreement that NES developers couldn't make games for competing systems).
While IBM took the grab-bag approach of "we'll make it so if we screw anything up, you can swap in a better part", Apple (with the Mac series) took the tightly-integrated approach of "we'll make it right the first time". Basically, it's the original computer example of the Cathedral vs. the Bazaar. Actually, though, there were a dozen different "Cathedral" models (Apple, Amiga, Atari, Commodore, TRS, etc.) vs. one basically unintentional "Bazaar" (IBM figured they were good enough to smother all competition, so they felt confident that they could bring their half-assed entry up to speed with a modular upgrade approach, after they decided whether people really wanted these newfangled "micro-computers").
NASA demands to be deeply involved in testing any new launch vehicle, and they're a typical bungling government bureaucracy that only ever succeeds through sheer force of funding.
Example: DC-X. NASA didn't build it. It flew beautifully. On another test flight, NASA technicians screwed up and left a vital component unconnected so a landing strut didn't come down, and the prototype crashed and burned. NASA loudly proclaimed the design unsafe. That was the last we heard of DC-X.
Example: Hubble. NASA didn't check the optics before sending it up. The main mirror was exquisitely built to the wrong focus, which they never tested.
Example: The shuttle. How many of the damned inefficient things did they build with the same design? After building the first one, they learned that it was more expensive than using disposable rockets for any purpose whatsoever. However, when they realized their mistake, instead of following the original plan of learning from the first one to make better ones, they started building near-exact copies!
As the old true half-joke goes: when NASA was confronted with the problem of writing in space, they spent millions of dollars developing a pen; the Russians just used pencils. Bureaucracies with too much money lose any connection to common sense; the managers find ways to increase their budget for the status it gives them, increasing complexity and causing stupid mistakes.
People have been promising cheap launch services since the 60's if only NASA wasn't involved. None have been allowed to try.
Since anyone who wants to launch a rocket must meet NASA's requirements, they are all limited to NASA's technical capabilities. The NASA attitude is "if we couldn't built it, nobody else possibly could," and as long as they are involved, they are right.
Please be more specific. You are making vague assertions.
So are you. Or at least one ridiculous assertion: "Government approval isn't needed[...]"; just because it can be granted without a Big Official Review Process directly between the satellite builder and the government doesn't mean it isn't needed. If you try to launch something that the government doesn't want up there, you won't succeed, and of course they have people in places they need to be to make sure of that.
You think there aren't government observers checking every cargo to make sure it's nothing but communications and acceptable scientific equipment? (in other words: inspecting and approving them) You think that the cost of these observers wasn't included in the price for the use of "government facilities"?
You think that if they find something remotely questionable that the person who wants it sent up won't have to carry the financial burden of convincing the government that it's acceptable? That they won't just stamp the forms "no launch!" and wait for you to convince them otherwise? (in other words: making you pay to prove they should let you launch)
If so, please support these claims, I find them quite incredible.
Maybe someone who produces very stock comsats might just possibly manage to launch one without personally meeting a government official (though the satellite certainly will), but not anyone who is trying to launch something new that's never been launched before.
Government approval isn't needed unless you are doing something weird...
Government approval is always needed, it just won't be granted in some cases, and they'll make you pay to prove to them that they should let you.
If you are developing a new launch vehicle, you will have to convince the government that you can keep flaming wreckage from landing on nearby cities before they let you launch a rocket.
...in part by being an old, well-respected (by the government; meaning past military contracts) aeronautical company using a tried-and-true design. The costs of getting permission to launch anything else carrying a significant payload into orbit would likely be around a billion dollars (on top of whatever it costs to build an launch the thing), unless it is an affiliated NASA project, in which case they'll just red-tape the rocket down to the ground.
Personally, I think the government is against cheap space travel. Right now, the USA pretty much rules the world with the world's largest economy and military. Once people go live in space, groundbound organizations will be less important, and anyone up there with the capability to move around can throw rocks that feel like nukes.
It should also be noted that the "flat...flat...flat... holy crap!" cycle is very common. Computers definitely follow that path as well,
Not a bit. Everybody who has worked with computers always wants more speed, more memory, more software, more everything. There's always one more thing you could do with a bit faster computer or a bit more storage.
From the very first fully automatic programmable computer, there has always been more demand than supply. At first it was "if only it was a bit cheaper, we could calculate these vital military trajectories" then "if only it was a bit cheaper, we could use it to run our accounting" then "if only it was a bit cheaper, we could have one at home for games and schoolwork" then "if only it was a bit cheaper, we could put it in our appliance/toy/greeting card". From the first real computer, there has always been an economic motive to make it just a bit better because there were always people lining up to put the chips in something else (or put a few more chips in, or replace one of the chips with a better one).
That's why sitting still isn't and never was feasible for computer companies (and most big companies are bound to falter sooner or later, and get some idiot manager who thinks he can squeeze for a bit more profit if he slows down progress). Anyone can come in, make an incremental improvement based on the works of the establishment, and expand the marketplace instead of trying to wrest the established company's market away from it.
This is not the case for rocketry. An upstart launch company would have a very hard time luring customers away from the establishment. After all, satellites are very expensive things, and nobody wants to take a chance on a no-name rocket, even if it's 30% less expensive, not to mention the incredible red tape they'd have to cut through to be allowed to launch. The reason "Nobody Gets Fired For Buying IBM" didn't kill the competition was the potential for expanding the market, which doesn't exist in the field of rocketry.
Call me when they learn to distinguish which city features cause what weather effects.
I can't believe the knee-jerk reaction displayed by the guy suggesting naive policy changes to hopefully minimize the effects, the it's-caused-by-humans-it-must-be-bad attitude.
There's no point in wasting money on implementing policy changes when you don't know what those changes will cause.
...a computer simulation, or a brain in a vat hooked up to a simulated environment. I wouldn't be too worried about a brain in a vat oozing out and scooping my brain out so it could sit in there.
Besides, I think the profit could be quite substantial. My earning potential is a long ways from the mere survival level.
<hidden from="TheDullBlade"> Yep, he's got it basically right. I keep him and my other copies (not all of myself) in a row of vats. He wonders why he has such a boring life; I made sure he wouldn't have anything more interesting to do than program computers. I'm thinking of cutting his link to slashdot, he wastes way too much time on it, and he's as expensive as you'd think. -ButterKnife </hidden>
...than someone who raises an objection that's worth answering, but then calls me an idiot. You remind me of my English teacher, who I always had to fight with because he thought that every story had One True Interpretation (with which everyone must agree) and I consider all the possible interpretations to be part of the final work.
the things which aren't in the work are sometimes more important than the things that are in it.
This depends on your definition of "in the work". By my definition, anything which might be perceived by a reasonable person is in the work, not just the things which are blatantly shown, but the nuances and suggestions. The suggestions and possibilities are a real part of the work, the intentions of someone who worked on the project are only real to the extent they are expressed in the final product.
The point I was trying to make is that an unequivocal decision by the director that Deckard was a replicant is unimportant compared to the clearly expressed (but not unquestionably verified) possibility that Deckard was a replicant. I believe he wished to express uncertainty, keep the audience guessing, and he succeeded. I do not believe that he wished to express that Deckard was definitely a replicant; his decision that Deckard was, is something he chose to keep out of the film, making the uncertainty more real than his decision.
ambiguity is very often the essence of good literature
Indeed, and if ambiguity is part of the work, then private decisions about the ambiguous topic are not part of the work (though a bias toward this choice can spring from this decision and become part of the work). If they have to tell you about it afterward, they didn't do their job of telling the story the way they intended.
astute viewers figured it out.
There is no real world that the creators are describing. There's no way to have "figured it out" because there's no reality underlying the expression (aside from the whole thing being a show put on with actors). Plots have holes, and either errors in production or deliberate ambiguity can create a work in which different possibilities are valid. This uncertainty is a real part of the work, regardless of what its makers intended.
Truly astute viewers merely noted the possibility, and did not get stuck in the mental mire of acting as if there's a real world behind the story.
A version of "Wizard of Oz" with a bit of minor editing would remove the final revelation that the whole thing was a dream. What if that had been the release cut? It would certainly match the book more closely (in which Oz is real). Fans of the movie might argue over whether it was a dream (earlier scenes in the movie certainly suggest it, though they don't make it 100% clear).
It wouldn't matter one bit if the director came out years later and insisted that the whole thing was supposed to be a dream, or even if the director's cut included the final revelation. The author clearly intended that it not be a dream. Whose vision is more valid? The director is only one player, and he doesn't even have final control over the editing. Many a director's decision is reversed in the cutting room.
Ultimately, the reality of the film's content is more important than the vision of the director. Whatever he thought, he may not have achieved his vision. Whether it was through interference or incompetence is irrelevant.
Note that the director's cut of Blade Runner is significantly different from the release version, and suggests much more strongly that Deckard was a replicant. Perhaps in the final editing for release, it was decided that people would like the movie better if Deckard wasn't a replicant. What, then, is the "reality" behind the expression?
When you sift out all the fiat decisions, only the uncertainty remains.
Slashdot Mirror
EROS will bounce back onto the desk you originally lifted it from!
...and really, if something that tough does live on Earth, it's probably already been thrown all around the solar system by volcanoes and such.
You're right, I can't imagine this being a concern.
I'll start hearing the Dragon Warrior music, and it won't go away. (or Mega Man, or Final Fantasy, or any of a couple dozen video games that I can pick out from the outlines of the main character sprites burned into my retina)
I love those old songs, but I never want to hear anything like them again!
It only takes a mention of one of those old games to get me humming its theme music for a week, if I hear new ones I'll eventually have a complete set of rotating video game music in my head. That would be a fate worse than death, worse even than getting a Muzak ear implant.
But I doubt 5-6 code audits per line applies in the cheaper/faster/better NASA of today.
metric/imperial unit confusion
...the bacteria that live in rocks in the Antarctic?
We really don't know all that much about the extremely hostile environment organisms, because they're hard to culture. When we rub something on agar and don't get a culture, we tend to assume nothing's there (obviously, I'm oversimplifying, but our test methods generally look for stuff that likes "good" conditions).
You make good points, but I still wouldn't be too surprised if there are a few really tough spores floating around each cubic meter or air that will survive for a thousand years in practically any conditions and are just waiting for properly miserable conditions, like you describe, to wake up.
...into Saturn or Jupiter?
Putting a balloon with a good video camera on it in a gas giant's atmosphere would be the coolest thing since Viking.
I think NASA's first priority should be getting people interested in space, which means a steady stream of cool pictures of alien worlds. Forget about getting maximum scientific bang for the buck, if they can raise interest to the point it was when they started the Apollo project, they'll have lots of money to do science.
All I can say about this project is that they'd better send home some good pictures, instead of just using the images for the on-board computer.
You're about to kill a thing and you worry about causing it pain? It's a good idea not to cause unnecessary pain to an animal you're going to keep, because otherwise it might turn on you or otherwise be harder to handle, but a painful death gives exactly the same result as a painless one.
I wouldn't gutshoot a deer, but that's because I'd hate to either lose it or foul the meat.
I think the proper way to kill livestock is to bleed them. It makes the best meat and doesn't contaminate the meat with CS fluid (which may or may not spread mad cow disease).
IMHO, we should save our concern for those who will still be alive tomorrow.
When I die, I want to go out kicking and screaming, not caught unawares or drugged mindless.
Now there was a "War is cool!" movie if I've ever seen one.
The opening scene did a pretty good job of showing the very worst of war, but the final bridge-guarding scene was total "rah-rah the American army kicks ass!" tripe (entertaining though it was). Yeah, some of them died, but not the main characters, and they were very improbably successful against those odds.
I bet that movie did wonders for US army recruiting.
For you non-Canadians out there, section 33 is known as the Notwithstanding Clause.
Basically, it states that the government can disregard section 2 (labeled "fundamental freedoms"), sections 7-14 (labeled "legal rights"), and section 15 (labeled "equality before the law"), under slightly irregular terms (but not requiring any special justification).
Furthermore, section 1 says: "The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society."
This sounds nice, but our supreme court only seems to read "subject to...reasonable limits", meaning that if the law infringes on your rights, but the judges think it it's "reasonable", the law stands and the rights are ignored.
So, between these two sections, we Canadians have no rights over whatever laws our current government sees fit to pass.
We screwed up bigtime. Watch your government so it doesn't happen to you.
...but it was too distracting being constantly surrounded by food, looking up at me with it's liquid little eyes, as if to say "Eat me! Please, Sir, I'm ever so tasty. There's a microwave in the break room, you can cook me there."
Are you really just trolling me?
I seem to have PO'd some jerk with moderator access, he's going around marking all of my posts as trolls (I guess he couldn't find "-1: Moderator Was Offended" or "-1: Moderator On Vendetta"); he'll get his in the MM. I'm trying to explain that this argument is based on a misunderstanding, and my other "trolls" provoked agreeing replies, or no replies, but not arguments. If I'm trolling, I'm doing a piss-poor job of it.
I'm not arguing in any way that heroin doesn't have legitimate uses (if you look in my "user info" and read some of the other stuff I've written in this discussion, you'll see that), or that legalizing it won't reduce harm. I'm only arguing that it's a completely different situation than alcohol prohibition (pot prohibition, OTOH, is a more similar to alcohol prohibition, though still on a lot smaller scale).
If you read my posts more carefully, you'd see that. I might ask if you are trolling me, since you almost seem to be intentionally ignoring my words.
For example...
Me: Everybody knows that heroin (as it is available on the street) is 1) very addictive and 2) bad for your health to the point where you
might die every time you use it.
You: Your number 2 is a property of street heroin [...]
"as it is available on the street": I put those words in for a reason, and you replied as if I had implied the opposite. That whole post was about the kinds of people who take heroin now, and the total disregard they have for their own welfare. It's like people who play Russian roulette: take away the revolvers and they'll find something equally stupid to do (and whether there are legitimate uses for revolvers, or crime could be reduced by legalizing them and building them so they don't blow up in your hand, has no significance to that problem).
There's a tiny minority of people who use heroin, almost all of them abuse it, and they're pretty screwed up to begin with. Practically everybody drank alcohol before and during prohibition, most of them used it fairly responsibly, and most of them had reasonable mental health.
Escapism and self-destruction are not the same thing,
True, but heroin use isn't escapism, it's self-destruction. Everybody knows that (again, as it is available on the street) heroin is terrible for your health and any one high might kill you. Knowing that, what kind of idiot would start taking the stuff? Only the severely self-destructive kind.
If heroin is made relatively safe, the people who are currently drawn to heroin will find something equally or more self-destructive to do.
This is why legalizing heroin will not save many junkies: only a fairly small proportion of them ever regain the mental stability to avoid self-destructive behavior. It would be very good to save them, but it's not nearly as important as making sure a little drink on the sly doesn't blind or kill the majority of your citizens.
So I guess I have 2 arguments: 1) the junkie problem is a problem with the junkies, not the junk, and 2) all the junkies could die tomorrow, and society at large would barely notice (some unreliable workers wouldn't show up for work, some welfare cheques would stop being collected, crime would go down), but if a quarter the people who drink alcohol occasionally went blind or died from it, society would be severely disrupted. 2 isn't a pleasant argument, just a cold, hard fact: prohibition had to be lifted, it would have destroyed the country; while it would be good to lift heroin prohibition, it is not strictly necessary.
...that heroin today doesn't hurt anyone who's not asking for it. It's been illegal for a long time, and everybody knows how unhealthy the junk you can buy on the street is.
The only people who start doing it are halfway suicidal. People who value their lives don't fill a needle with god-knows-what they got off the street and pump it into their veins.
With prohibition, OTOH, alcohol started out in extremely common use. People had ways of doing things (like partying) that required alcohol, and when their regulated, healthy supply was cut off, they naturally used the unregulated, dangerous supply (having had access to the good stuff all their lives, they just expected that the most dangerous think in their bathtub gin would be ethanol).
The point was that alcohol prohibition killed healthy, productive members of society, while the heroin prohibition mostly kills suicidal nutcases who will probably find some other way to off themselves a bit at a time if heroin is made relatively safe. The main benefit of legalizing heroin (to the junkies) is saving the relatively small number who eventually come to their senses; the majority have serious mental issues, and heroin use is just one more self-destructive behavior symptomatic of these problems.
I'm not arguing that heroin should be illegal, I just don't think it's as important as prohibition was.
By contrast, alcohol today is relatively safe, with only two types of victims being common: guys that drink themselves to death over a period of years because they're too chicken-shit to just jump off a bridge, and people killed when morons drive cars around drunk.
Everybody knows that heroin (as it is available on the street) is 1) very addictive and 2) bad for your health to the point where you might die every time you use it.
Do you think that the people who take heroin aren't just the same "too chicken-shit to just jump off a bridge" people who drink everything in sight as soon as they can get their hands on it?
They know it's bliss in this needle and death in the next! They don't care. To try heroin in its common use (supply: who knows what's in it, dose: as high as you can get, so much that you'll never be able to get that high again), you have to decide that your life isn't worth more than a bit of fun.
Sure, if they survive for some years, they might change their mind about what their life is worth. That's where it really sucks. People would never bother with insanely addictive megadoses of heroin unless, at the moment they take it, they don't value their life.
Yes, heroin might not be the "horrible, horrible thing it is today", but that doesn't mean that the same people wouldn't destroy themselves somehow.
That isn't the case with alcohol.
Alcohol is integrated into society, probably because weak alcoholic drinks (like watered wine, as the Greeks drank at breakfast, lunch, and dinner) were a lot safer to drink than water from ponds and rivers. When prohibition came, people still didn't know how to party without booze. So a lot of normal, non-self-destructive people were put in the position of needing to buy bathtub gin. It's pretty different.
I became addicted to cigarettes because i was unwise
I smoke, but I am not an addict. I have been smoking a pipe for about 4 years and I keep my pipe, tobacco, and matches in my coat pocket so it is always with me. I enjoy smoking tremendously, but I only do it once every month or two. At times, early on, I tried smoking every day, and tried cigarettes. I knew that I didn't want to continue to do this, but I wanted to see what it was like (my curiosity is one reason I stay away from most drugs; since I've done things like gather a jar of spiders and dump it down my shirt to see what effect it would have on me, at the time a moderately severe arachnophobe, I know it wouldn't take a big step for me to be dissecting my hand to see how all the cords and levers work. I think I need all the inhibitions I've got).
I've felt the cravings. They don't impress me. Despite feeling as if my hand was drawn toward my pipe pocket, constantly imagining how nice it would taste to suck smoke from the pipe, thinking how much I liked to strike matches and enjoyed the scent of a struck match, I didn't light up. Given that I wasn't going to smoke, they were as relevant as imagining how much fun it would be to ride a dragon. That is how I think of them, which is why they don't influence me.
The key factor in removing (or avoiding) an addiction, or correcting any stupid behavior, is a moment of clarity. Practically every cigarette smoker, every drunk, and every junkie who dropped their habit started to get their hit one day and thought "this is stupid, I may feel like want this right now, but I will regret doing it, so I don't really want it".
There is a simple 4-step method to have a moment of clarity whenever you need one:
1)Ask yourself "What is my situation?"
Be totally, brutally honest. If your whole body is metaphorically screaming for your addiction to be satisfied, note that. If you've got the means to satisfy that craving close at hand, note that too. Don't deceive yourself or make claims about what you think you can handle at this stage.
2)Ask yourself "What do I, as a rational person, really want?"
Be complete. Not just "I want to make the craving go away" but "I want to make the craving go away, I'd rather not have it come back, and I want to avoid the dangers of taking this drug".
3)Ask yourself "What should I do to achieve that?"
This will usually be very clear (ex. don't light that cigarette, or any others).
4)Obey your rational choice.
Don't think to yourself "I really shouldn't smoke another cigarette", tell yourself "don't smoke another cigarette." Mean it. Give yourself an order, and obey it. Don't play coy little games and pretend there's some force pressing your hand toward the cigarette case, there isn't and the idea that there is and the idea that your hand is itching to grab for a cigarette is silly. Your hand doesn't want a cigarette, it has no mind of it's own. You crave the cigarette, but that has nothing to do with your hands, which are controlled by your mind, which has decided that it's not going to move the hands to light the cigarette.
It sounds stupid, but talking it out with yourself works. That infuriating part of the mind that makes cravings creates illusions of a more direct link between the craving and the process of consuming what is craved; these illusions are easily dismissed by rational thought. You get satisfaction endorphines that blunt the cravings. Don't bother removing the temptation, that removes the positive reinforcement of frequently resisting that temptation. Carry that pack of cigarettes around with you, and you'll be surprised how good it feels to not smoke them, even when you feel lousy from nicotine withdrawal. Try to waste cigarettes, hide them from yourself, and make them tough to get at and you'll give in to the illusion that you're fighting an enemy, instead of making a decision.
Wake up. Be sane. Don't get bogged down in the metaphors your subconscious provides; your consciousness was built to filter them out when they're not useful. Your subconscious has been tricked into thinking your body needs the drug, your consciousness is both responsible for and capable of recognizing this deception and acting appropriately.
You've taken half the step and realized it's your own fault. Take the other half and realize that it'll be your own fault each time you smoke another cigarette.
I've seen way too many lives destroyed by the horrors of real drugs.
Were they indeed real drugs? Or were they the adulterated garbage that is most commonly sold on the street?
Most drugs are cut, and drug dealers aren't too picky about what they cut it with: if it matches colour, it'll do.
Heroin certainly isn't good for you, but stuff like baking soda, baby powder, and laxative powder does not belong in your veins! Pure heroin's effects are almost purely psychological, it's physical side effects are relatively minor (unlike, say, alcohol). Never mind the difficulty of determining an appropriate dosage from an unreliable source!
Consider a moonshiner who makes rotgut with nearly as much methanol as ethanol and you'll have some idea of the kind of suppliers you're dealing with.
The biggest problems of drugs are caused by them being illegal: impure supply, high cost, inability to openly discuss your habit (both for moderating use and technical skills like learning how not to blow bubbles in your veins), and the feeling "I'm a criminal, what's one more crime?". Not only that, but they have some valid uses:
Heroin is a pain killer 4 times as effective as morphine.
Coca leaf tea is a little pick-me-up like coffee, and is good for the digestion.
Pot makes you relaxed, friendly, and hungry (and stupid). It's a social lubricant like alcohol, minus the puking and bar fights (plus pigging out and laughing at really bad jokes; pretty good trade-off, no?). They should be encouraging people to use it instead of alcohol, it would cut way down on crime.
If weed, shrooms, and E are gateway drugs, it is only because they are illegal. If you could get them at the corner drug store, you wouldn't be rubbing elbows with the heroin pushers.
IMHO, uppers, downers, intoxicants, and happy pills all have their place, when used in moderation (hint 1: uppers' & downers' place is not entertainment, hint 2: intoxicants are not for solitary use, hint 3: unlike intoxicants, it is not appropriate to encourage your friends to take happy pills with you). I personally think messing with hallucinogens is wrong, people have little enough grasp on reality as it is.
The war on drug users must be stopped at all cost. They are the victims, as well as the perpetrators, and punishing them does no one any good.
You can call me weak or say I have no will power, but I am not the only one out there who has been addicted to something.
A lot of ex-addicts have that "I'm a victim, I must be protected from that evil stuff" mentality. Well, guess what? You did it to yourself.
Everyone told you "the more you take it, the more you'll want to take it", but did you carefully watch how much you were taking and nip it in the bud while you still could?
It has nothing to do with will power and everything to do with laziness and self-destructiveness. Between all the drug war propaganda, and the current quality of drugs available, both irrational and rational people know doing "hard" drugs is a bad idea. Despite the way you people describe it it's not "that sounds like fun, I think I'll try it!" it's "my life sucks, but I'm too much of a pussy to kill myself all at once." To Hell with you! Clean yourself up and learn that real happiness comes in small bites or get some quicker-acting poison and do it right, but don't whine to me about how you got lured into it, I know that's bullshit and I really don't care anyway.
A lot of fat people claim to be addicted to overeating; that's not sufficient reason to put everyone on a strict diet and break into candy factories with guns blazing.
...because it was mostly off-the-shelf. Most importantly, the CPU and the OS were 3rd-party products that anyone could buy.
Add in that the peripheral and software markets were open, meaning that the necessary interfaces were documented, including every function of the BIOS. So now you've got the CPU, the OS, the peripherals, the firmware, and the specifications for how it connects to everything. Reverse-engineering is too strong a term for most of what the people had to do to clone the PC.
Basically, you just had to recreate the motherboard chipset (for which you practically had the functional spec already) and you could buy the rest of the components on the open market for the same price IBM pays, and then your computer could take advantage of all the software written for the IBM PC.
If you wanted to clone an Apple, you had to clone everything, and to get your hands on the specs, you had to sign agreements not to use it for anything nasty like cloning (not quite as nasty as some other agreements, though, like Nintendo's infamous agreement that NES developers couldn't make games for competing systems).
While IBM took the grab-bag approach of "we'll make it so if we screw anything up, you can swap in a better part", Apple (with the Mac series) took the tightly-integrated approach of "we'll make it right the first time". Basically, it's the original computer example of the Cathedral vs. the Bazaar. Actually, though, there were a dozen different "Cathedral" models (Apple, Amiga, Atari, Commodore, TRS, etc.) vs. one basically unintentional "Bazaar" (IBM figured they were good enough to smother all competition, so they felt confident that they could bring their half-assed entry up to speed with a modular upgrade approach, after they decided whether people really wanted these newfangled "micro-computers").
NASA demands to be deeply involved in testing any new launch vehicle, and they're a typical bungling government bureaucracy that only ever succeeds through sheer force of funding.
Example: DC-X. NASA didn't build it. It flew beautifully. On another test flight, NASA technicians screwed up and left a vital component unconnected so a landing strut didn't come down, and the prototype crashed and burned. NASA loudly proclaimed the design unsafe. That was the last we heard of DC-X.
Example: Hubble. NASA didn't check the optics before sending it up. The main mirror was exquisitely built to the wrong focus, which they never tested.
Example: The shuttle. How many of the damned inefficient things did they build with the same design? After building the first one, they learned that it was more expensive than using disposable rockets for any purpose whatsoever. However, when they realized their mistake, instead of following the original plan of learning from the first one to make better ones, they started building near-exact copies!
As the old true half-joke goes: when NASA was confronted with the problem of writing in space, they spent millions of dollars developing a pen; the Russians just used pencils. Bureaucracies with too much money lose any connection to common sense; the managers find ways to increase their budget for the status it gives them, increasing complexity and causing stupid mistakes.
People have been promising cheap launch services since the 60's if only NASA wasn't involved. None have been allowed to try.
Since anyone who wants to launch a rocket must meet NASA's requirements, they are all limited to NASA's technical capabilities. The NASA attitude is "if we couldn't built it, nobody else possibly could," and as long as they are involved, they are right.
Please be more specific. You are making vague assertions.
So are you. Or at least one ridiculous assertion: "Government approval isn't needed[...]"; just because it can be granted without a Big Official Review Process directly between the satellite builder and the government doesn't mean it isn't needed. If you try to launch something that the government doesn't want up there, you won't succeed, and of course they have people in places they need to be to make sure of that.
You think there aren't government observers checking every cargo to make sure it's nothing but communications and acceptable scientific equipment? (in other words: inspecting and approving them) You think that the cost of these observers wasn't included in the price for the use of "government facilities"?
You think that if they find something remotely questionable that the person who wants it sent up won't have to carry the financial burden of convincing the government that it's acceptable? That they won't just stamp the forms "no launch!" and wait for you to convince them otherwise? (in other words: making you pay to prove they should let you launch)
If so, please support these claims, I find them quite incredible.
Maybe someone who produces very stock comsats might just possibly manage to launch one without personally meeting a government official (though the satellite certainly will), but not anyone who is trying to launch something new that's never been launched before.
Government approval isn't needed unless you are doing something weird...
Government approval is always needed, it just won't be granted in some cases, and they'll make you pay to prove to them that they should let you.
If you are developing a new launch vehicle, you will have to convince the government that you can keep flaming wreckage from landing on nearby cities before they let you launch a rocket.
...in part by being an old, well-respected (by the government; meaning past military contracts) aeronautical company using a tried-and-true design. The costs of getting permission to launch anything else carrying a significant payload into orbit would likely be around a billion dollars (on top of whatever it costs to build an launch the thing), unless it is an affiliated NASA project, in which case they'll just red-tape the rocket down to the ground.
Personally, I think the government is against cheap space travel. Right now, the USA pretty much rules the world with the world's largest economy and military. Once people go live in space, groundbound organizations will be less important, and anyone up there with the capability to move around can throw rocks that feel like nukes.
It should also be noted that the "flat...flat...flat... holy crap!" cycle is very common. Computers definitely follow that path as well,
Not a bit. Everybody who has worked with computers always wants more speed, more memory, more software, more everything. There's always one more thing you could do with a bit faster computer or a bit more storage.
From the very first fully automatic programmable computer, there has always been more demand than supply. At first it was "if only it was a bit cheaper, we could calculate these vital military trajectories" then "if only it was a bit cheaper, we could use it to run our accounting" then "if only it was a bit cheaper, we could have one at home for games and schoolwork" then "if only it was a bit cheaper, we could put it in our appliance/toy/greeting card". From the first real computer, there has always been an economic motive to make it just a bit better because there were always people lining up to put the chips in something else (or put a few more chips in, or replace one of the chips with a better one).
That's why sitting still isn't and never was feasible for computer companies (and most big companies are bound to falter sooner or later, and get some idiot manager who thinks he can squeeze for a bit more profit if he slows down progress). Anyone can come in, make an incremental improvement based on the works of the establishment, and expand the marketplace instead of trying to wrest the established company's market away from it.
This is not the case for rocketry. An upstart launch company would have a very hard time luring customers away from the establishment. After all, satellites are very expensive things, and nobody wants to take a chance on a no-name rocket, even if it's 30% less expensive, not to mention the incredible red tape they'd have to cut through to be allowed to launch. The reason "Nobody Gets Fired For Buying IBM" didn't kill the competition was the potential for expanding the market, which doesn't exist in the field of rocketry.
Call me when they learn to distinguish which city features cause what weather effects.
I can't believe the knee-jerk reaction displayed by the guy suggesting naive policy changes to hopefully minimize the effects, the it's-caused-by-humans-it-must-be-bad attitude.
There's no point in wasting money on implementing policy changes when you don't know what those changes will cause.
...a computer simulation, or a brain in a vat hooked up to a simulated environment. I wouldn't be too worried about a brain in a vat oozing out and scooping my brain out so it could sit in there.
Besides, I think the profit could be quite substantial. My earning potential is a long ways from the mere survival level.
<hidden from="TheDullBlade">
Yep, he's got it basically right. I keep him and my other copies (not all of myself) in a row of vats. He wonders why he has such a boring life; I made sure he wouldn't have anything more interesting to do than program computers. I'm thinking of cutting his link to slashdot, he wastes way too much time on it, and he's as expensive as you'd think.
-ButterKnife
</hidden>
...than someone who raises an objection that's worth answering, but then calls me an idiot. You remind me of my English teacher, who I always had to fight with because he thought that every story had One True Interpretation (with which everyone must agree) and I consider all the possible interpretations to be part of the final work.
the things which aren't in the work are sometimes more important than the things that are in it.
This depends on your definition of "in the work". By my definition, anything which might be perceived by a reasonable person is in the work, not just the things which are blatantly shown, but the nuances and suggestions. The suggestions and possibilities are a real part of the work, the intentions of someone who worked on the project are only real to the extent they are expressed in the final product.
The point I was trying to make is that an unequivocal decision by the director that Deckard was a replicant is unimportant compared to the clearly expressed (but not unquestionably verified) possibility that Deckard was a replicant. I believe he wished to express uncertainty, keep the audience guessing, and he succeeded. I do not believe that he wished to express that Deckard was definitely a replicant; his decision that Deckard was, is something he chose to keep out of the film, making the uncertainty more real than his decision.
ambiguity is very often the essence of good literature
Indeed, and if ambiguity is part of the work, then private decisions about the ambiguous topic are not part of the work (though a bias toward this choice can spring from this decision and become part of the work). If they have to tell you about it afterward, they didn't do their job of telling the story the way they intended.
astute viewers figured it out.
There is no real world that the creators are describing. There's no way to have "figured it out" because there's no reality underlying the expression (aside from the whole thing being a show put on with actors). Plots have holes, and either errors in production or deliberate ambiguity can create a work in which different possibilities are valid. This uncertainty is a real part of the work, regardless of what its makers intended.
Truly astute viewers merely noted the possibility, and did not get stuck in the mental mire of acting as if there's a real world behind the story.
A version of "Wizard of Oz" with a bit of minor editing would remove the final revelation that the whole thing was a dream. What if that had been the release cut? It would certainly match the book more closely (in which Oz is real). Fans of the movie might argue over whether it was a dream (earlier scenes in the movie certainly suggest it, though they don't make it 100% clear).
It wouldn't matter one bit if the director came out years later and insisted that the whole thing was supposed to be a dream, or even if the director's cut included the final revelation. The author clearly intended that it not be a dream. Whose vision is more valid? The director is only one player, and he doesn't even have final control over the editing. Many a director's decision is reversed in the cutting room.
Ultimately, the reality of the film's content is more important than the vision of the director. Whatever he thought, he may not have achieved his vision. Whether it was through interference or incompetence is irrelevant.
Note that the director's cut of Blade Runner is significantly different from the release version, and suggests much more strongly that Deckard was a replicant. Perhaps in the final editing for release, it was decided that people would like the movie better if Deckard wasn't a replicant. What, then, is the "reality" behind the expression?
When you sift out all the fiat decisions, only the uncertainty remains.
Bladerunner had special meaning for me. I'm afraid that I'm a simulation the real me built of himself so he could get more work done.
<hidden from="TheDullBlade">
heh heh, TheDullBlade is a replicant
-ButterKnife
</hidden>